A blog about societal, cultural, and civilizational collapse, and how to stave it off or survive it. Named after the legendary character "Crazy Eddie" in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's "The Mote in God's Eye." Expect news and views about culture, politics, economics, technology, and science fiction.

Saturday, November 26, 2011

Small Business Saturday Linkspam

As I wrote in This is why yesterday was Buy Nothing Day for me, "Small Business Saturday should be the subject of the next post." Here it is, next post, where I explore a story at the intersection of economy and society in the sustainability diagram below--Small Business Saturday.

If you have pledged to participate in Buy Nothing Day on Friday, Nov. 25, but don’t think you can go for the Buy Nothing Christmas, then I have another pledge for you to take: participate in Small Business Saturday. When you head out to do your holiday shopping on Nov. 26, avoid the big box national chain stores and shop at your local small businesses instead.

Although this is only the second year for the event, it is already popular among the Facebook crowd. The official Small Business Saturday Facebook page has more than 2.2 million Likes. People don’t just like the site, they are also discussing it. At this time more than 260,000 people are actively talking about the day.
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Here it is a full year later and the economy is still struggling. The nation’s small business owners are the key to the recovery and the more that we can do to help boost our local economies, the better the national economy becomes.

First there was Black Friday. As e-commerce reached popularity in 2005, Cyber Monday was created. Now there is a new shopping holiday: a grassroots movement known as "Small Business Saturday" to help flailing local merchants and businesses.
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Small Business Saturday aims to attract shoppers to local businesses for discounts the same way Black Friday, celebrated in shopping malls and megastores across the country, does.
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However, the Saturday shopping event was not created to discourage shoppers from large retailers, but rather to include small businesses in the equation as a counterpart in the holiday shopping madness. As reported by ABC News, a 2004 study from Economic Impact shows that for every $100 consumers spend at local business, $68 remains in the local economy while on $43 remains when the same amount is spent at a chain store.

When you hear the words “small business,” Facebook, YouTube, FedEx and American Express aren’t typically companies that come to mind. But this year all four of them are promoting shopping at small retailers for “Small Business Saturday,” the mom-and-pop counterpart to Black Friday.
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A number of other big businesses have also pitched in. YouTube is providing a geo-coded hosting platform on which small business owners can create videos about their shops. FedEx gave $25 American Express gift cards to the first 30,000 customers who liked their Facebook page on November 1. Facebook serves as the hub for the initiative, offering a trove of marketing tips for merchants and ways to “get involved” for customers at facebook.com/shopsmall. Facebook and AmEx gave away free $100 Facebook ads to 10,000 businesses, and the number of people who “liked” the page doubled since last year, to 2.4 million.

“Facebook presents a great opportunity for businesses to create an ongoing two-way relationship with consumers,” said David Fischer, Facebook’s vice president of advertising and global operations. “Businesses have the ability to leverage those connections every day, not just on Small Business Saturday.

[Small Business Saturday shopping expert for American Express Patricia] Norins has talked to small-business owners who are planning everything from balloons and banners to Santas and tree lightings. Many are joining forces to produce shopping maps of participating local businesses or offering cross promotions such as handing out different free cookies at neighboring stores. Norins believes this type of momentum can translate beyond the day to connect customers with local businesses year-round. "Consumers have a huge opportunity to find unique products and personalized customer service," she says. "It instills a sense of community, which is important on a local and national level -- more money stays in the community and more jobs are created."

We talked to eight small retailers nationwide to find out how and why they're going above and beyond to attract shoppers this Small Business Saturday.